


The Girl with the Goat Head

by edylue



Category: Original Work
Genre: Animalistic, Cannibalism, Fratricide, Gen, Matricide, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-02 08:47:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10941036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edylue/pseuds/edylue
Summary: Collin walks in on his younger sister eating their mother.





	The Girl with the Goat Head

**Author's Note:**

> request: horror

It was a rainy Thursday night when Collin walked in to find his sister devouring their mother. He can still recall the odor of decay and fear in the air as the sound of little teeth peeling off muscle from bone filled his ear drums. The storm outside made a perfect cover for his screams and the other obscenities that fell out his mouth, as the language he was producing would force the neighbors from their comfy beds to file a complaint to the local law enforcement. At that moment, Collin's mind is on the track of figuring this out himself, but, in retrospect, he probably did more wear and tear on the situation at hand.

His sister, from her position in the middle of their carefully furnished living room, had not moved nor even noticed her brother's return from a friend's house. She continued to rip limb after limb, bone after bone off the figure of their slowly dying mother. The look of terror on her face persists to haunt Collin's dreams whenever he closes his eyes for a moment of rest. Expressions other than complete turmoil and fright could not etch its way back onto their mother's once youthful face, no matter how hard she tried to twitch a lip or blink an eye. Her mouth formed into an  _O_  when his sister wrapped her small fingers around the right shin bone, pulling, pulling, pulling, until Collin could hear the sickening noise of a joint being dislocated. His sister tossed aside the limp appendage and took it upon herself to crouch down and tear apart the flesh with her incisors, like a hyena on top of a zebra. His mother moaned and groaned, but her pleas didn't last long. Collin watched with uttermost frozen fear as his sister produced a hammer from his late father's toolbox and smashed it against their mother's head.

It was like a balloon bursting in a quiet room, deafening everyone in a close range with silence and anxiety.

Collin couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He couldn't even cry.

He could only watch as his sister pried apart the remains of her flesh and pulled out the skull of their mother. And then, slowly, almost as if everything happened in slow motion, he saw his little sister—his little six-year-old sister—shove a bit of brain matter into her mouth, chew, and smash their mother's skull atop her head like a sick attempt at a helmet.

He doesn't remember what happened afterward. The police report said he had run to a neighbor's house, but had gotten hit by a car on the way there. The driver was so distraught at the situation, she agreed to take Collin to the hospital, but then she said she had to tell Collin's parents first, and she went toward the house, and Collin had tried to warn her about the crime scene, but his head hurt, so he couldn't really talk, and everything was going black, and the storm was beginning to worsen, and there was a loud roar, and he never made it to the hospital, and that's why he has trouble breathing now.

Collin was sent to his grandmother's house a few blocks down. The rumors at school were horrible and less than truthful. His friends told him they'd heard from some man who has a cousin who has a brother who has a friend who's a cop that his sister had screeched like some sort of wild animal and grew long cream horns from the top of her head when they were trying to take her in. Collin didn't want to believe them.

He hasn't seen his sister since. Although, he receives calls from the children's psychiatrist hospital, asking if he'd like to visit her, but he lets those go to voicemail.

He is twenty-three years old now, fresh out of college with a degree in history he's bound not to use. He keeps it hidden under lock and key, along with sets of photographs from his childhood.

Like the ones featuring his sister.

She'll be sixteen in a few days, and he's not sure if he should drive down to the children's ward to see her, but he decides against it. He's not ready to confront her.

*

Collin often goes to sleep before the clock hits ten, but the image of his sister with tendons and ligaments hanging out her red, red lips cause him to shake into chaotic periods of nightmares and fits until the alarm on his phone wakes him at six thirty. He's sore whenever he rouses, and he chooses to cling to his pet ferret rather than get ready for the day.

He receives a call from the hospital that evening. The message they leave is one urging him to visit his "loved one on her special day". Instead of calling back, he feeds his ferret, cleans its litter box, and heads to bed.

The wind roars outside his window, dragging out a whine from his small animal. He helps the creature onto his bed before lying back and doing his best to fall asleep. The brown-and-white ferret makes home on his chest, curling into a small ball, and Collin watches it until his eyelids droop shut.

*

In the middle of the night, Collin hears a few objects fall to the ground in his kitchen. Scraping sounds, like chairs against floor, alert his senses, but he merely pushes a pillow to his face, oblivious, knowing it's only his pet wrecking havoc.

Then, his ferret stirs on his chest, deep in slumber.

Collin hides under the blankets.

*

His kitchen is a mess. It takes him hours to clean it up.

*

The noises continue to pull him out of his sleep the next night. He does his best to ignore them.

But then, he hears a knock on his bedroom door and the huff of a beast with large nostrils.

Collin stays perfectly still, and he soon feels the presence of the animal leave him. He doesn't get much sleep after that.

*

In the morning, he finds long claw marks down the wood of his bedroom door. He runs his fingers along the carvings, and shivers run up his spine. His ferret watches nearby, lightly clucking.

*

When he gets a call from the children's hospital, he picks up.

This call is different from the others, though. Instead of a cheery lady over the line wishing for him to visit his ill relative, it's an obituary read off by a monotone man.

"She died last night," he tells Collin, "in her sleep. Shame. Tomorrow's her birthday."

*

A storm is unfolding outside. Collin hears a dozen cracks of thunder, sees the lightning, and he knows a few trees fell over in the process. He calmly watches the weather broadcast, terribly disappointed when the meteorologist promises more rain is on its way. Pleasant thoughts and desires don't cloud his head tonight. The overwhelming fear of that, that  _beast_ coming after him is almost mind-numbing. He doesn't want to sleep tonight, doesn't want to sleep ever again, but his body begins to betray him, and he has no other choice than to sink under the bed covers and fly off to sleep.

But, not that long after his acceptance to slumber, he is woken by the loud squeal of his ferret. Collin barely has enough time to even skid into the living room, where its cage is, before a loud rumble of thunder shoves him off guard. He whips his head around to look back at his bedroom, and the numbers on his alarm clock seem to bleed out 03:00 a.m. into his corneas. A flash of lightning strikes the night sky, and a dark figure seems to appear on his bed, looming atop the surface, piercing red eyes as vibrant as the alarm clock.

Collin is running even before his mind can process it. He rams his little toe into the wall, and with a sudden outburst of profanity, he rolls to the ground, doing several somersaults before reaching his final destination at his ferret's cage.

Inside, the little animal is squeaking and running around the edges, eyes wide and paws trembling as if in some sort of warning.

Collin doesn't turn around, because he knows the beast is there. He can feel the eyes on the back of his neck, forcing the hairs upright.

But the shake of thunder and the whine of his ferret cause him to roll onto his back, tilting his head upward to gaze at the perpetrator of their fright.

He sees a terrible creature with long cream horns on the top of its head, disappearing into a vast forest of black fur that swirls around the beads of little red eyes. Before he can let out a scream, he notes the rest of the beast's body, and—wait a minute. The monster has stick thin arms and legs. It has a childish black dress stretched over its torso and thighs, and under that—one of Collin's white button-down shirts. He knows it's his; he knows it, and he can't explain it. He's always given his sister his shirts to wear, but it's physically impossible for her to have this particular one. It's practically new, one he had just bought, but here this beast is—wearing it.

The monster's nostrils flare, and its eyes are narrowed as its head tilts, expelling the massive horns to the nearby window, letting them shine from the streetlights and moon outside. The thing huffs, his ferret squeaks, and he stares with an incapability to breathe as he utters out, "Charlotte."

The creature's small stature slowly begins to falter, weaken as its back hunches, leaning into Collin. The eyes blink, and he can smell the rain and mud caked into its fur. They seem to connect gazes for a few seconds. He offers a smile. "Do you remember me?" he asks.

The ferret continues to whine as the girl with the goat head extends out a pale, pale arm and touches her palm to the side of Collin's face.

*

Blue and red lights lick the scene of the small house off the main street into town. Everything is still; the storm has lifted. A police officer on duty enters the establishment. She's gotten a call from a neighbor who insisted there was a domestic disturbance happening in the house over from theirs. She decided to check it out, expecting to find a couple with bruises and glares standing across the room from each other. That would have been easier to handle rather than what she had encountered when she stepped into the home.

A girl, most likely in her teens, is sitting in the middle of the living room. The television set is on, turned onto a forgotten infomercial. Beside the girl is a body of a young man. His skin has been peeled off the muscles, and the girl, it seems, is working the muscles off the bone, popping each handful into her mouth as she chews up the boy with rough bites and gnarled growls.

The officer doesn't quite recall what happens when she pulls out her gun and aims it at the girl. She can only remember a low roar; a pair of razor-sharp teeth; long, curled horns; and a caged ferret shrieking.


End file.
